The City glitters with wealth. There’s “milk and honey in every Frigidaire, and muzak playing in the air.” In its shadows lies the Bayou, a squalid and overcrowded housing development, pulsing with cockroaches and overrun by twenty-something grannies and a rat pack of restless children. When do-gooder Agnes Eaves arrives with an Art Course for juvenile delinquents—“love, encouragement, and a bit of collage”—her endless optimism slams into a nascent Marxist revolution and a city government with its eye on lobotomizing gumdrops. The Animals and Children Took to the Streets is a hardscrabble mashup of fable, fairy tale, and Orwellian dystopia. Visually inventive and corrosively witty, the action plays out against an intricately choreographed backdrop of music and animation.
The piece was created by the remarkable London-based company 1927. Founded in 2005 by writer/director/performance poet Suzanne Andrade and animator/illustrator Paul Barritt, 1927 combines live performance and music with animation and film. Their arresting aesthetic style comes from their reinvention of early-twentieth-century idioms—silent film, music hall song, and cabaret—to craft stories for a contemporary audience.
While The Animals and Children Took to the Streets takes its inspiration from the company’s long-standing artistic interests in Fritz Lang, Russian Constructivism, and Buster Keaton, it also springs from more contemporary influences. While touring their first piece, 1927 visited Hong Kong’s Chungking Mansions, a five-tower complex that functions as a mini-city of some of its poorest residents, which shaped their thinking about Animals and Children—and provided inspiration for the wall of cockroaches that introduces The Bayou. Closer to home, the social climate of East London and its juxtaposition of extreme wealth and poverty left its mark on the piece, as did Andrade’s experiences as a school teacher and the company’s conversations about medicating hyperactive children and other quick-fix solutions for ingrained social dynamics.
By refracting their social commentary through anachronistic forms and endlessly inventive theatricality, 1927 crafts a play that is playful, mordant, and unforgettable.